When Winthrop defended the colony, he wanted to create a religious community that would be saved from the “corrupted” bastions of learning, Oxford and Cambridge. Beyond fighting corruption and the Catholic antichrist, however, the new governor proved himself a pragmatic man. To attract settlers, he boasted that the amount of money required for purchasing a few measly acres in England translated into hundreds of acres in Massachusetts. In overpopulated Britain, he said, the land “groaneth under her inhabitants.” Nevertheless, Winthrop had no plan for redeeming all the poor, whom he referred to as the “scum of the land.” His vision of vile waste people differed little from that of the Anglican cleric Richard Hakluyt’s.41
Inequality was a given in the “Citty upon a Hill,” submission was regarded as a natural condition of humankind. In “A Model of Christian Charity,” Winthrop declared that some were meant to rule, others to serve their betters: “God Almightie in his most holy and wise providence hath soe disposed the Condition of mankind, as in all times some must be rich some poore, some highe and eminent in power and dignitie; others meane and in subjeccion.” Lest there be any doubt, Governor Winthrop despised democracy, which he brusquely labeled “the meanest and worst of all forms of Government.” For Puritans, the church and state worked in tandem; the coercive arm of the magistracy was meant to preserve both public order and class distinctions.42
In Puritan society, the title of “gentleman” usually applied to men with some aristocratic pedigree, though wealthy merchants who held prominent positions in the church could acquire the same designation. “Master” or “Mister” and “Mistress” were for educated professionals, clergymen, and their wives. “Goodman” attached to the honorable husbandman, who owned land but did not occupy a prominent position as magistrate or minister. New Englanders used these titles sparingly, but they were certainly conscious of them; the government they abided by, after all, imitated English county oligarchies in which the landed elite monopolized government offices.43
The Puritan elite depended on a menial labor force. At the top of the pecking order were apprentices and hired servants. Lower down were those forced into servitude because of debt or after having committed a crime, as we have seen in Virginia. Case in point: in 1633, Winthrop presided over the trial of a man accused of robbery. Upon conviction, his estate was sold and used to repay his victims. He was then bound for three years of service, and his daughter, as added collateral, bound for fourteen. This was typical. The 1648 Laws and Liberties established two classes of an even lower order who could be divested of liberty: Indians captured in “just wars,” and “strangers as willingly sell themselves, or are sold to us.” The “strangers,” in this case, were indentured servants from outside the colony as well as imported African slaves.44
For servants, seventeenth-century New Englanders relied most heavily on exploitable youth, male and female, ages ten to twenty-one. By law, single men and women were required to reside with families and submit to family government. Children were routinely “put out” to labor in the homes of neighbors and relatives. The 1642 Massachusetts General Court’s order for the proper education of children treated apprentice, servant, and child as if all were interchangeable. Parents and masters alike assumed responsibility to “breed & bring up children & apprentices in some honest Lawfull calling.” Family supervision policed those who might otherwise become “rude, stubborn & unruly.”45
Monitoring the labor of one’s own offspring became the norm, as landed families retained control over the males well into adulthood. Young men could not leave the family estate, nor escape their father’s rule, without endangering their inheritance. So family members worked long hours, as did servants of various ranks. While the extended Puritan family functioned with less recurrence to acts of ruthlessness than the system adopted during the tobacco boom in Virginia, legal and cultural practices muddied the distinction between son and servant.46
Thus the Puritan family was at no time the modern American nuclear family, or anything close. It was often composed of children of different parents, because one or another parent was likely to die young, making remarriage quite common. Winthrop fathered sixteen children with four different wives, the last of whom he married at age fifty-nine, two years before his death. Most households also contained child servants who were unrelated to the patriarch; during harvest season, hired servants were brought in as temporary workers, and poor children were purchased for longer terms as menial apprentices for domestic service or farm-work. The first slave cargo arrived in Boston in 1638. Winthrop, for his part, owned Indian slaves; his son purchased an African.47
While servants were expected to be submissive, few actually were. Numerous court cases show masters complaining of their servants’ disobedience, accompanied by charges of idleness, theft, rudeness, rebelliousness, pride, and a proclivity for running away. In 1696, the powerful minister Cotton Mather published A Good Master Well Served, which was an unambiguous attempt to regulate the Bay Colony’s disorderly servant population. Directing his words toward those who served, he insisted, “You are the Animate, Separate, Active Instruments of other men.” In language that is impossible to misunderstand, he reaffirmed, “Servants, your Tongues, your Hands, your Feet, are your Masters, and they should move according to the Will of your Masters.” Those of mean descent would learn from a sharp tongue or a ready whip that submission was expected of them.48
Puritan wariness did not end there. Among servants, and those of “meane condition” above them, were men and women of enlarged ambition who were deemed undeserving. At least according to anxious oligarchs. Puritans never opposed commerce or the acquisition of wealth, but they were clearly conflicted when it came to social mobility. The government enacted sumptuary laws, penalizing those who wore rich silks or gold buttons in an attempt to rise above their class station. Overly prosperous people aroused envy, and Puritan orthodoxy dictated against such exhibition of arrogance, pride, and insolence. In the 1592 tract On the Right, Lawful, and Holy Use of Apparel, the English Puritan clergyman William Perkins had shown how appearance demarcated one’s standing in the Great Chain of Being, God’s class hierarchy. Unsanctioned displays of finery were disruptive, an infraction on the same order as masters who treated servants too leniently. Both were perceived as early indicators of a society falling from grace.49
One had to know his or her place in Puritan Massachusetts. Church membership added a layer of privilege before the courts and elsewhere to an already hierarchical regime. Expulsion from the church carried a powerful stigma. Heretics such as Anne Hutchinson and Mary Dyer were physically banished, cut off and ostracized. Only those who begged forgiveness and humbled themselves before the dual authority of court and church returned to the community. Dyer returned unrepentant, determined to challenge the ruling order. Between 1659 and 1661, she and three other Quakers were charged with “presumptuous & incorrigible contempt” of civil authority. After trial, they were summarily hanged.50